Out of Captivity : Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

324 OUT OF CAPTIVITYtively harmless side of the line. Though we wouldn’t have done any ofthose things for the FARC, we also weren’t going to criticize Pérez andArteaga too harshly. Arteaga and Pérez didn’t seem to get along toowell; they seemed to be in competition with one another. I thought ofit as the two ass-kissers at any job struggling to be the number one asskisser.All we needed was a watercooler and a break room to make theoffice politics feel more like they had at home.Stepping into this new situation meant that we had to tread carefullywith our fellow prisoners and with the guards. Like we had done withMilton’s group, we assessed how we could use our relationships with theguards to our best advantage. As it turned out, we didn’t have a whole lotto discuss. This FARC group was far more professional and less likelyto interact with us on any level but the most superficial. This was mostobvious in our trading for goods. With Milton’s nicotine fiends, we wereable to work deals with them directly. Though the currency remainedthe same in the Reunion Camp, the method of exchange was completelydifferent. We had to go through Arteaga to trade cigarettes for what weneeded. Arteaga in particular had more supplies—batteries for the radios,bags of powdered milk, sleeves of crackers—than he really needed.That didn’t stop him from wanting to accumulate more. He used hisrole as a go-between to his full advantage. He wasn’t greedy; he wasbored and needed some form of excitement.Our fellow prisoners weren’t the only ones who seemed to have asurplus of gear and food. The FARC in this First Front were the bestequippedgroup we’d seen. They had portable DVD players, and oneof the first nights in that camp, we watched a Jackie Chan movie. Wewere mesmerized. After so long without seeing a moving image on ascreen, the effect was almost hypnotic. They could have shown a moviewith cows grazing for an hour and a half and we would have watched it.The FARC powered most of their electronics—laptop computers, DVDplayers, and communications radios—with motorcycle batteries wiredin a series or a Honda portable gas-powered generator. In addition they